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The Meming of Jessica Valenti

Update: Turns out this is the result of someone creating a Chrome app called “Men Kampf” that ‘nazi-fies’ text, including a toggle that applies the app only to Tumblr sites.

Some time back, I pointed out that you can tell when your feminism is fucked up by seeing what you get when you replace gendered descriptors in your feminist rants with racial descriptors. Which is a big part of the reason why I couldn’t force myself despite constant external social pressure to consider myself ‘feminist’. Anywho, I had played around with this notion and came up with this:

“So why am I writing about all of this again? It’s because I’m increasingly seeing the phrase “Not all blacks!” cropping up in discussions about black violence against whites. It seems that many are insulted by the perceived implication that all blacks are violent, evil, rapists and murderers. It’s those people that I really want to read this post. Because you see, when we’re talking about issues like black violence and I refer to “blacks” (and obviously I can only speak for myself) I’m not saying that all blacks are the same. That would be ridiculous. What I’m doing is referring to blacks as a sociological group, in the same way that I might refer to the middle-class or the Latino population. And blacks, as a class, are a threat to whites, as a class. What I’m not saying is that any individual black is a threat. With me so far? Good.”

I never linked to the original, because the purpose was not to shame but to be illustrative of the problematic rationale being used by some feminists.*

But anyway, recently Jessica Valenti has been subjected to similar treatment with several of her past and recent headlines.

I don’t know that the Aryan/Jew relationship and word-swap necessarily captures the same feel. In my old example, you get more of the feeling that the person who was writing was just ignorant of how terrible what they were saying really was but it was something that you COULD imagine someone having seriously argued (especially down where I live). On the other hand, Valenti is not someone simply waffling their words and not realizing how horrible what she’s saying is, she’s an ideologue, so maybe the comparison isn’t far off? There’s a reason why the term feminazi stuck: there really isn’t a better word that encapsulates mainstream feminism’s often violent rhetoric, its association with far-left socialist politics and typical ad-vocation for dominant statist authoritarian policies and practices.

*:And yes, the responses in the wake of the Isla Vista shooting were one of the final straws that snapped me out of my thankfully brief foray into being something of an SJW. That and people using the word mansplaining.

3 responses to “The Meming of Jessica Valenti”

The examples don’t work because the oppressor/oppressed relationship is flipped. Done right, the analogy works rather well:

“So why am I writing about all of this again? It’s because I’m increasingly seeing the phrase “Not all white people!” cropping up in discussions about white violence against black people. It seems that many are insulted by the perceived implication that all whites are violent racists. It’s those people that I really want to read this post. Because you see, when we’re talking about issues like white violence and I refer to “whites” (and obviously I can only speak for myself) I’m not saying that all white people are the same. That would be ridiculous. What I’m doing is referring to white people as a sociological group, in the same way that I might refer to the middle-class or the Latino population. And whites, as a class, are a threat to blacks, as a class. What I’m not saying is that any individual white person is a threat. With me so far? Good.”

The revised paragraph above may be difficult to read, but it is true (in the U.S.). Similarly “Jews don’t hate Aryans. But it wouldn’t matter if we did,” is also just a factual statement because of the historical power imbalance between the two groups. (I am also assuming that anyone who calls themselves an “Aryan” is a white supremacist because, honestly, when else do you see that word? So it’s really not surprising they’d view white people as the ones under attack.)

I think when it’s done with race, it works both ways, in part because all races have been taught, despite any efforts to the contrary, that other races are the enemy. The same is happening between men and women. That fear exists within both sides of the structure of oppression. Those who were part of the same class as former oppressors (real oppressors, not a nebulous oppressor class) fear reprisal just as those who were oppressed or part of the same class as those who were oppressed fear that they will be oppressed again either by their former oppressor or those in a similar class. So often we hear about how it’s so wrong to “other” people, but so much of modern gender and race thought and writing is predicated on othering.

I don’t think that the current Aryan/Jewish meme works as well for illustrative purposes, but again, I did not know at first that the meme was the result of a chrome word-replacer app.